Telegraph

Sunday 4 November 2001

BBC did not tell police about bin Laden caller in London By Sean O'Neill (Filed: 03/11/2001)

THE BBC did not inform police of a telephone call it received from a London representative of Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrorist network.

The corporation's Arabic Service took the call on Thursday morning minutes before it was faxed a copy of bin Laden's most recent statement urging Pakistani Muslims to overthrow President Musharraf.

The caller, speaking in Arabic with a marked Pakistani or Afghani accent, said he represented bin Laden and wanted to send a statement to the BBC World Service.

Although he said he was calling from outside Britain, a digital display on the telephone in the office where the call was taken revealed that it came from a London number.

Details of the contact - which suggest that an al-Qa'eda cell may be active in London - were not reported to the anti-terrorist branch, which is hunting bin Laden associates in Britain. BBC insiders said that they feared the number of the anonymous caller, who reporters tried without success to ring back, had been lost.

Scotland Yard is unhappy that it was not notified about the call. Anti-terrorist squad officers are now examining the matter but it is feared that their chances of tracing the caller have been lost because of the delay.

A police source said: "Distributing statements on behalf of terrorists is an offence. We would like to have been informed." Al-Qa'eda has used London as a base for disseminating its propaganda before.

Between 1996 and 1998 an organisation named the Advice and Reformation Committee, based in west London, is alleged to have acted as a media office for bin Laden.

It distributed his declaration of a jihad against the United States and al-Qa'eda's admission of responsibility for the August 1998 east Africa embassy bombings.

Khalid al Fawwaz, Ibrahim Eidarous and Adel Abdel Bary, who worked for the ARC and are alleged to have been members of al-Qa'eda, are all in custody in Britain fighting extradition to America in connection with the embassy bombings plot.

But police believe that other members of the al-Qa'eda cell which was operational in London in the 1990s evaded arrest and could still be in Britain. Thursday's call was made at around 8.30am - some time after news of the bin Laden letter had first been broadcast by al-Jazeera, the Qatar television channel.

The caller refused to disclose his identity and turned down requests for an interview but talked to reporters for some minutes. A BBC insider said: "He said he was a representative of Osama bin Laden and he had a fax he would send to us."

"We believe he was calling from London. This is the first time we have received a statement from bin Laden." Reporters noted the London number which had appeared on the telephone display and tried calling it but got no reply.

They checked the number with the BT operator who told them it was "operational". Several minutes after the telephone call the bin Laden statement - describing the war on terrorism as a conflict between Christianity and Islam - arrived by fax.

The fax header stated that the document was "From Taliban" and carried a six-figure number but no code. It was timed at 1.29pm - the time difference suggesting transmission from Pakistan or Afghanistan.

A spokesman for the BBC World Service said the telephone call had not been reported because Scotland Yard had not requested any information about it.

A spokesman said: "The caller claimed he was a bin Laden representative but we cannot say definitively that he was. Like any news organisation we don't ring the police as a matter of course."

The BBC said last night it believed the call came from abroad. The spokesman said the number seen on the phone may have been garbled if the call originated overseas.

Earlier, the BBC News website said the call was made in London, though this suggestion was later removed.

-- Anonymous, November 03, 2001